Friday, February 19, 2010

Now Available: Nathan Hauke's In the Living Room

In the Living Room investigates the fact that the intimacy of domestic spaces is perforated by wilderness. Full of ragged joy and shot through with terror, Hauke’s poems mark faith and companionship at edges as they attempt to find themselves at home in change. Reaching toward the transformative potential of their circumstances, they face the realization that “love’s echoes everywhere” unmake us.

"Nathan Hauke is a poet to be taken at his word. In the Living Room means exactly what it says: the room is alive; a place has already been prepared for us; and there is no room for death. Hauke's is a visionary architectonic, and he refreshes me." --Donald Revell

"As it is in Flannery O'Connor's short fiction, grace in the world of Nathan Hauke's poetry is hard-edged and hard-won. To experience it is to risk annihilation as well as redemption. Both 'mirror and field guide' to the thorniness, difficulty, and utter radiance of the material world, the poems in this collection bear witness to and transform the way we experience language/dailiness/consciousness/divinity. They challenge us to be wiser, more nuanced readers and writers, and human creatures. This is gorgeous, important work from one of our smartest, most generous, and very best emerging poets. Read it. Read it again." --Donna de la Perriere

“‘The living room is all windows’ and Hauke’s In The Living Room is too. Stained-glass, transparent, bombed-out, or covered in Spring’s pollen, these windows layer into an improvised architecture which includes our hellish and beautiful world the way water does its waves.” --Mike Sikkema